By Matthew Sorrento. I can understand the resistance to film the story of Jackie Robinson since the man himself played the role in 1950. Robinson is a legend so grand that actors would struggle to approach the man behind the story. Onscreen, should Jackie be destined for greatness? Or just […]
Family Friendly Torture Porn
By Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. “Watch new blood on the eighteen inch screen The corpse is a new personality Watch new blood on the eighteen inch screen The corpse is a new personality.” (Gang of Four, “5:45,” from the album Entertainment! [1979]) Television shows such as I Was Impaled (2012-) and […]
New Narratives for the 21st Century
By Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. With the exhaustion of film narrative an accomplished fact, it would seem that new, “anti-narratives” might be an early clue to a new direction. Inspired by the famous comment by Jean-Luc Godard that a film should “have a beginning, a middle and […]
North Korean Red Dawn: Olympus Has Fallen
By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Part Kim Jong-un’s “the West must fall” fantasy come to life, part right wing wet dream and all around militarist anthem, Antoine Fuqua’s Olympus Has Fallen (2013) is an updated riff on John Frankenheimer’s Manchurian Candidate (1962; though we’ve already had that in 2004, directed by […]
Jack the Giant Slayer
By Cleaver Patterson. In film fantasy farmhouses have always been a popular mode of transportation between our world and that of make-believe. Dorothy used her Uncle Henry and Aunt Em’s humble home in The Wizard of Oz (1939) to reach a land beyond her wildest dreams, and now the ramshackle […]
Lab Coats in Hollywood
By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Scientists and mathematicians will never understand artists, and vice versa. This was brought home to me forcefully by David A. Kirby’s book, Lab Coats in Hollywood: Science, Scientists, and Cinema (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), which traces the checkered history of math and science experts in […]
Gay Friendly (as long as you’re not Palestinian): The Invisible Men
By Morvary Samaré. The Invisible Men, an Israeli film by director Yariv Mozer, was one of the documentaries that screened at this year’s One World Human Rights Film Festival in Prague, Czech Republic. The film portrays the stories of three gay Palestinians and their struggle to create a tolerable life […]
Re-Birth of a Nation or Why Django Has More to Say about Contemporary America than the Other “Historically Accurate” Films
By Celluloid Liberation Front “The former enemies of North and South are united again in common defence of their Aryan birthright.” (D.W. Griffith in The Birth of a Nation) “A single Negro regiment would have a remarkable effect on Southern nerves… A war of this kind must be conducted on […]
The Shining 2.0 or: How New Media Changed Film Analysis
By Hampus Hagman. In Iron Man 2 (2010), Tony Stark discovers that his deceased father has left behind coded sketches for a revolutionary new element that could not be realized during his lifetime due to technological limitations. It is up to the son to decode these and use the means […]
Truth in Pop Art: An Interview with Donny Miller
By Wheeler Winston Dixon. “Remember, you can have anything. You just have to think it. Just kidding, life isn’t that simple.” (Donny Miller) Donny Miller is one of the more interesting visual artists working today; he’s active not only in graphics and painting, but also video art, performance art, and […]